iPad 9.7‑inch

I'm not super knowledgeable about this so take this with a grain of salt. Some of this might be wrong.

Good modern touch screens, like the iPhone/iPad/Macbook trackpad are capacitive touch screens. An array of sensors emit a changing electric field which is affected by the dielectric constant of nearby materials, and fingers have a different dielectric constant from air. Capacitive sensors cannot detect pressure (although you can fake it a little).

Good modern digital pens, like the Wacom or Pencil, use radio waves. An array of antennas emits radio waves which are picked up by an antenna in the stylus. A microcontroller in the stylus computes the position and angle of the stylus, reads the pressure from another sensor in the stylus tip, and transmits the data back to the tablet over radio.

So you can see that they really are completely different technologies.

You can make a capacitive stylus, and those exist, you can even buy them at the store. However I've never seen a capacitive stylus that can detect pressure or angle at all, and capacitive sensors can't tell the difference between a stylus and your hand, so you can forget about resting your hand on the screen when you draw. The main reason I'd use a capacitive stylus is because I want to use an iPhone or iPad while I'm wearing gloves.

> I don't disagree with the lesson, but does it always apply? When Jobs came back Apple was in a different place than it is today.

Maybe, but on the other hand there is a lot of similarity between Apple v. Microsoft/PC-cloned on desktop and Apple v. Google/Android-devices on mobile.

And one similarity would seem to be that Apple is in no position to win on breadth and choice, but they may be in a position to win (at least, create a solid, profitable I market where they have little effective competition) by identifying key niches, and narrowly tailoring offerings to them.

In fact, I'd argue that their path in tablets and smartphones has been pretty similar as in PCs; they developed the market ahead of everyone else with fisrly narrow offerings, a competing platform emerged where the core software was separate from hardware manufacturers offering more choice, and drew them into trying to compete on the kind of choice offered by the competition.

Jobs also wanted one phone at one screen size based on some cargo-cult science about average thumb length. Apple was watching its lunch being eaten by people who would have had probably bought an iPhone but wanted the big screens Android has to offer. Thus the multiple iPhone models. He was also against the mini iPad size, which is the only iPad I'm willing to buy.

I think the limited product line is an artifact of the time and place Jobs and Apple were in the early 2000s. They had endless Mac models and a underwhelming value proposition. Cutting that down to a single colorful little Mac and a single pro product and their laptop equivalents made sense. Introducing the mobile revolution one simple product at a time also made sense.

Now they need to continue to make sales, so adding more products to address more niche markets is the only way forward. They've probably exhausted their "one size fits all" market at this point. Apple can't accept no or negative growth, so more niche products it is.

Then that's good news for those who own the current model, isn't it? It will take longer for their tablet to obsolesce via OS update.